Whistleblower shines a light on dark side of the web
The whistleblower behind a scandal involving data collected from millions of Facebook users warned attendees at a Vancouver conference Wednesday about the threat posed by those who harness social media for nefarious political purposes.
Christopher Wylie, a social researcher and data scientist from Victoria, spoke at Cambridge House International’s Extraordinary Future about his time as former director of research for Cambridge Analytica and its London-based affiliate SCL Group.
Wylie, 29, is known for his role as whistleblower for bombshell reports last March on Cambridge Analytica’s unauthorized collection of data from 87 million Facebook users, information intended to be used in political campaigns during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
The company closed operations in May and two weeks later Wylie testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on data privacy.
He described the firm’s creation by players linked to the Tea Party movement and so-called alt-right, including Steve Bannon, who was chief strategist at the White House during the first seven months of Donald Trump’s presidency, CEO Alexander Nix, and investors Robert and Rebekah Mercer.
Wylie said it was important for people to understand that Cambridge Analytica used tactics and techniques that originated from military research and development, such as those used to hamper Islamic State recruitment.
“You can either send in a drone and blow that guy up, or you can deceive, trick, confuse, create paranoia — make him leave on his quote-unquote ‘own volition’ by disseminating information or disinformation via online or rumours and all that in the temporal space,” Wylie said.
Wylie said that, while there was a vast difference between the rules of engagement in elections and war, voters could be targeted in much the same way as enemies. Political campaigns working with firms like Cambridge Analytica can collect voters’ online data to identify their conspiratorial thinking or racial biases, so that they can then deceive and sway them during elections with information “which is not necessarily true but is conducive to amplifying (their) dispositional starting point.”
For example, a voter might get invited to join a Facebook page such as “Smith County Patriots” and engage in discussions with other page members — some of whom aren’t who they say they are — read fake news articles and, eventually, attend a local event consisting of a small percentage of the group’s 1,000 or 2,000 members, Wylie said.
“All of a sudden, you go from a fantasy online into a Starbucks, into the real space, and you see tons of people from your community,” he said. “You think all of a sudden, ‘Everyone in my community thinks like me,’ and CNN, they’re not talking about it, NBC, they’re not talking about it. Actually, they’re not real. This is real.”
In the military this is called “insurgency building,” which is what Bannon hoped to achieve with Cambridge Analytica, Wylie said.
In politics, a candidate who lies may be held accountable by the media, an opponent or a member of the public, but such is not the case with such online campaigns, Wylie said.
“That (real-world) community has a shared understanding and a common understanding of what’s being said,” he said.
“The difference with what’s happening on Facebook or other social platforms is, rather than me just speaking in a public forum, I can go to each and every single one of you and I can whisper in your ear something ... with the benefit of having followed you around months on end, read your conversations, listened in on what you say, what you’re interested in, what you watch, what you listen to, and know exactly the types of things that you connect with.”
All of these can be done anonymously by operatives posing as Facebook users who have similar beliefs and opinions.
“When you think about the effect on our democracy, it degrades or eviscerates the public forum,” Wylie said.
“Disinformation is like magic. It feels real and you enjoy what you see. You enjoy being deceived because it’s something that you want to see ... and that’s what makes it so dangerous.”
Concern about the influence of shadowy social media campaigns on elections isn’t limited to U.S. federal politics.
Tuesday, the Vancouver-based Breaker News reported Facebook had taken down two pages related to mayoral campaigns in Vancouver due to policy violations.
The anonymous pages “Vancouverites for Affordable Housing,” which promoted Yes Vancouver’s Hector Bremner, and “Vancouver Deserves Better Than Ken Sim,” which attacked the Non-Partisan Association candidate, were both unpublished over the past week.
A Facebook employee told the Breaker that the pro-Bremner page had been removed for violating the company’s authenticity policy, while the anti- Sim page had violated its spam policy.